On Wednesday, for nine hours, German television and radio – and the Internet – carried the election in the federal parliament of the tenth president of Germany. The winner was Christian Wulff, premier of Lower Saxony since 2003. He was the candidate of Angela Merkel’s governing coalition (Christian Democrats and Liberals). It required three unpredictable ballots to elect him. The ratings were comparable with those of the World Cup. The president has powers not unlike those of Canada’s Governor-General. The president is the moral arbiter of the nation.
Wednesday’s drama provided a textbook example of democracy-in-action. Each ballot was touch and go. Had the Left-Wing party (die Links-Partei) voted with the SPD (the socialists) on the first ballot, Angela Merkel’s candidate would have been defeated. (The Links-Partei is the successor to the DDR-communists.) Its members regard themselves as anti-bourgeois outsiders in the federal republic.
The SPD (socialists), had nominated Joachim Gauck as their candidate, an impressive Lutheran clergyman from Rostok (i.e., the former DDR) who played a leading role after the reunification of Germany in exposing the misdeeds of the Stasi, the secret police.
Both candidates are men of unchallengable integrity – one a professional politician, the other unattached to any party. This made Joachim Gauck attractive to many idealistic young people who disdain party politics. The election had become necessary because the last president, the economist Horst Köhler, a former head of the IMF, had resigned on May 31. He had found the job personally unsatisfying. This was an explanation many Germans found a little puzzling. It was held against Angela Merkel that after a simple telephone conversation with him she accepted his resignation without making much of a fuss.
Although Christian Wulff was Merkel’s candidate, the election on the third ballot was interpreted as a setback for her. She had miscalculated; it might easily have gone against her. Wulff needed forty-four votes to win on the first ballot; some of these missing votes came from her party, i.e., they were cast by defectors. This is considered further evidence of her declining authority. Had she supported the other candidate, Joahim Gauck, an unpolitical man whose background was very much like hers, her man might have won on the first ballot. Both Merkel and Gauck come from East Germany. Her father, too, had been a Lutheran minister. But she decided to support a man of her own party.
In the end her man won, but she lost. In a television round table discussion on Wednesday evening, carried by the Deutsche Welle, her style of leadership was criticized as typical of a scientist, which she is by training, the kind of person who makes experiments in a lab, displaying detached curiosity rather than passionate involvement. It is also held against her that there is too much squabbling inside her coalition, not to mention her unpopular position in favour of bailing out Greece.
For a completely different perspective on the German political scene, an extract from the Corriere della Sera of June 22 might be enlightening. The paper quoted the French author André Glucksman:
“Has German Chancellor Angela Merkel beaten French President Nicolas Sarkozy in all disciplines? This is a question that preoccupies Paris and Berlin at the moment. But the true problem is Germany’s relapse into petty bourgeois conformism and its blind faith in the East. The citizens on the other side of the Rhine today are no imperialists…. They are thrifty, don’t get into debt and don’t live at other people’s expense like the southern Europeans or the Americans. In short, they have reverted to the habits of the petty bourgeois….
“Its new boundary, its new Far East, is the ‘modernization’ of Russia…. Germany’s crazy ideas are not the result of imperialism or thirst for adventure. But to believe Russia can be modernized without democratizing its society is a daydream. Ten years of Putin’s ‘vertical power’ have turned the dream into madness. Despite the manna of petrol and gas revenues, the unfettered corruption has prevented an economic boom. Without freedom of opinion there can be no control over the dealings of the mafia. Without democratization there can be no modernization.”
